DIYdock

title | DIYdock

client | onelab oneprize competition, nyc 2014

team | cyrus dahmubed + bryan yang

Brooklyn Navy Yards boasts a rich naval history with a wealth of drydocks, the source of inspiration for DIYdock, an interdisciplinary studio space centered on the use of cloud networking and digital projections. Using the drydock as both a historical and metaphorical foundation, our proposal seeks to foster interdisciplinary work through the immediate projection of the work produced by those within the studio onto the floating Vessel overhead, thereby creating a cloud of creativity that will inspire the cross-fertilization of ideas. As students and faculty download and save their files, their work is automatically projected onto the underbelly of the overhead Vessel, which houses the lecture hall and exhibition space. The Vessel will therefore be a dynamic representation of a diversity of creative ideas constantly in flux.

The studio spaces themselves also encourage interdisciplinary work as their ramps and tiers constantly cause students and faculty to brush up against each others’ work, while the centrally-located, highly-visbile lounge, the Slip, functions as a gathering and co-working space. Perturbed by the way in which bookshelves too often become dividers in even the most well intentioned attempts at fostering cooperation between design disciplines, DIYdock eschews standard forms of space and thinking to create a space for a future of design without walls.

urban archipelago

title | urban archipelago

studio | a water project - columbia gsapp ny/paris 2013

critic | alessandra cianchetta

This project was for the redevelopment and rethinking of an underutilized reservoir of non-potable water in a high-end, residential neighborhood of central Paris. The project began with an analysis and mapping of Paris at micro and macro scales, which resulted in an understanding of the city as a growing collection of isolated and distinct islands, each with individual merits and challenges. The result was an architectural masterplan that borrows the form of some of the "islands" studied in the mapping phase to create a mixed-use development, centered around a public library. An archipelago rises from the water housed in the reservoir, which is embraced along with the divide it causes and the exceptional quality of space that can result from clearly defining, dividing, and densifying.

mobi(ha)us

title | mobi(ha)us

studio | all fashionable paris - columbia gsapp ny/paris 2013

critic | babak bryan

As a transitional project between the New York and Paris studios of Columbia University GSAPP's NY/Paris program, Mobi(ha)us took as its site Paris' famed Palais Garnier. Developing upon the program of a fashion designer's atelier, this iteration incorporated a cafe and observation/viewing area. By focusing on the Opera's hidden, labyrinthine ballet school and accompanying residences, a stark contrast was drawn in relation to the intentionally extremely public and "see-and-be-seen" nature of the landmark's Grand Staircase and Theater. The duality of this relationship - that one building may have two entirely different sides to it, one structure with two faces - was embraced in the simple module of the Mobius Strip. The project became the study of the architecture of inversion: how might the extremely private spaces of the Ballet School residences be transformed into public spaces while the more public spaces take on a more cloistered nature. The resultant architecture implemented the Mobius Strip as a controller of density and porosity. When the strip in its simplest, most open form it is used to transform private spaces into public. When in its considerably more complex form, where through the process of cutting and bending the Strip is multiplied and the degree to which it is curved is exaggerated, the spaces created are significantly more intimate and are strategically deployed in previously open and public parts of the building.

flat embrace

title | flat embrace

studio | sightlines/site lines - columbia gsapp ny/paris 2013

critic | thomas de monchaux

This project was conceived as a seating structure and viewing platform to be situated in New York's famed Byrant Park. By analyzing the Park's embracive quality - in plan and section - as a product of the vertical variance of its stairs and ramps, a diagram was produced whose form was abstracted and extrapolated into a notional plan, section, and elevation for the new structure. This structure enhances the sitter/climber/observer's understanding of Byrant Park's hidden verticality by providing an object whose inhabitability exists explicitly on multiple at varying heights.

placemaking is spacemaking

title | placemaking is spacemaking

studio | display/delay - columbia gsapp ny/paris 2013

critic | jane kim

This macro investigation of the way that landmark structures can influence, define, and provide a unique quality to a space explored and classified three varieties and functions of monuments at play in Madison Square Park. This classification led to the creation of a modular system to be assembled into a screen/armature/display device and was intended to be placed in the Prow Art Space at the tip of the Flatiron Building. Constructed by following a system of joining techniques, the structure consciously creates and influences the space around it and monumentalizes the garments that inhabit it.

(un)dressing room

By reevaluating the scale of placemaking is spacemaking, this project created an un-sited dressing room based on spatiotemporally disassociative observations of wool in every stage of a garment's production (from unshorn sheep to worn sweater) in New York's Garment District. The progress of the state and usage of the wool parallels a fluctuating body-garment/garment-city relationship wherein the wool functions first as body (to the sheep), garment (to the wearer of the sweater), and finally the wearer puts on the city and is subsumed into it. Using the previous structure's skeleton, wool is manipulated from nebulous to woven fabric to construct a group changing room in which inhabitants move through the space while undressing in the public eye thereby further manipulating the relationship between the body, garment, and city.

push + pull

title | push + pull

studio | an attempt at exhausting a place - columbia gsapp ny/paris 2013

critic | babak bryan

This project was an investigation into the forces at play in urban life - particularly the most explicit of instructions that come in the form of signs. By analyzing the forces of a collection of signs on one block in Manhattan's Lower East Side, a topographical map was devised that demarcates the physical affects that are had on people traversing this block. The result is an understanding that what might be perceived as a conscious and deliberate action is frequently instead a reaction to the forces that move us. To make this understanding haptic, a prosthetic was designed from a simple white Oxford shirt. The prosthetic connected the opposing arms and legs of the wearer to each other so that any attempt to move one limb forced the movement of another, thereby making the wearer hyperconscious of the action/reaction relationship. The effect of the prosthetic on the wearer's perception of this was tested by deploying it in the same block as was initially studied and discovering the new forces encountered in attempts to perform everyday activities.

neighborhome

title | neighborhome (ware st. residence)

studio | gsd career discovery

critic | sara queen

This project was for the design of a two-family home to partially replace a small parking lot on Ware Street in Harvard Square. One of the major design challenges was to a few parking spaces that would be retained behind the home, this requiring a driveway to cut through the first floor of the building. Additionally, the assignment called for the blurring of public and private/indoor and outdoor spaces thereby encouraging the neighbors to come together in the home’s shared spaces. Further guildlines were created by the selection of two individual families as clients, both of whom had specific needs and desires from the home. This element allowed the project to become nearly self-generative: by creating spaces that followed the needs of the residences, the building largely designed itself. Nevertheless there was opportunity for specific design choices: doubleheight spaces were ascribed to the most important rooms in each unit, which were also the main areas for intramural gathering, a winter garden on the roof provided year-round green space, which contributed to the neighborhood, and could be used as a gardening and social space for both families. As part of the Harvard GSD’s Career Discovery program, this project was a first foray into critically thoughtful design.